Stone Wall Mythology — More “Yankee Lore”

A Video Transcript and More

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…” — Poet Robert Frost wrote in Mending Wall. Great poem.

San-Francisco-born Frost is one of Yankee Lores premier mythologists. His mythical, mostly made-up, New England continues to appeal to the descendants of Yankee settlers, as he echoes family lore and legends, casting them in a nostalgic golden light — the anecdotal given poetic authenticity.

Farmer Hauling Wood for winter fuel near Littleton, New Hampshire (Left), and The Old Farm House by Currier and Ives (Right). Public Domain. Library of Congress.

But it’s not real. It just feels real. City boy Frost’s assumptions on stone wall building and country and rural life in general still capture the country’s cultural imagination. Frost is the poet laureate of Yankee Lore.

Robert Frost at 85 — World-Telegram photo by Walter Albertin, 1959. Public Domain. Library of Congress.

We’re now so far removed from those early days, that way of life, that folks take Frost’s romantic representations for facts, but they’re fiction. Which would be fine, except some authorities have fashioned historical…